• Twenty-five years after premiering Pulp Fiction in Cannes, Quentin Tarantino returned to the French film festival with neither great vengeance nor furious anger but a gentler fairy tale about 1960s Los Angeles. Once Upon a Time In ... Hollywood made its much-anticipated debut Tuesday in Cannes, giving the festival its most concentrated splash of celebrity and frenzy. The film's two stars, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, displayed a fittingly old-school Hollywood glamour on the Cannes red carpet, where throngs of onlookers swelled along the Croisette. Much of the plot of Once Upon a Time In ... Hollywood had been carefully kept under wraps leading up to the premiere. DiCaprio plays a Westerns actor anxious that his notoriety is slipping. Pitt plays his stunt double, friend and, because of a drunken-driving offense, his driver. Though set against the backdrop of the Manson Family murders, much of Tarantino's film is invested in recapturing the radiance of a bygone Hollywood. For a filmmaker often associated with blistering dialogue and ecstatic explosions of violence, Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood finds the 56-year-old Tarantino working at a more relaxed pace, spending generous amounts of time in odes to spaghetti Westerns and '60s TV shows. Sony Pictures gave it a $95 million budget -- a now incredibly rare gamble on a high-priced original movie. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood will be released in U.S. theaters July 26.
• Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver's British restaurant chain filed for bankruptcy protection on Tuesday, partly because of increased competition and escalating rents in commercial districts. The insolvency will leave 1,000 people out of work and reignited worries about retail and food outlets in Britain, which are struggling to attract customers. "I'm devastated that our much-loved U.K. restaurants have gone into administration," Oliver wrote on Twitter. "I am deeply saddened by this outcome and would like to thank all of the staff and our suppliers who have put their hearts and souls into this business over the years." Oliver has personally pumped more than $16 million into his Italian chain, but it was not enough. Financial firm KPMG, which will oversee the process, said all but three of the group's 25 eateries will close. Overseas branches are not affected, nor is Fifteen Cornwall, which operates as a franchise. The company had been in trouble for at least two years, despite Oliver's global fame on the back of his cookbooks and television shows. Last year, it shuttered 12 of its 37 sites in Britain, while five branches of the Australian arm of Jamie's Italian were sold off and another put into administration.
A Section on 05/22/2019